Hexagons
- This documentation page is work in progress. Again I've been struggling with image resizing, which is making my prcess a bit clumsy and too long. I will fins a way to streamline the documantation better by next week. -
The next pattern I made is with hexagons. It was very fun to work with this shape after the triangles, as it's a multiple of the triangles but has quite different characteristics.
With Rhino I created 3 different designs, so I could play with the concept of the “gelosia/celosia” (someone help me with this word in English) again, balancing visible with invisible (in Italian, vedo-non vedo).
When I proceeded to laser cut the patterns, I used the same settings that worked with the triangles:
Material: felt 1.5 mm
Speed: 12
Power: 35
Time: 20 min for the whole cut
However, something weird occurred, which I should have checked in detail in advance. The cuts for the interlocks were in the design and were exported in the dxf file, but they didn't come out when I laser cut them :(
After troubleshooting with Oscar, thanks to his help I found out that the reason the lines for the cuts didn't come out was that they weren't flat on one plane. Because of how I designed them on Rhino, they had changed orientation on the y axis :S
I tried to add the lines and juxtapose the new file on the older one, which I hadn't moved. In an attempt to be 100% sustainable and avoid wasting material, I spent a bit too much time on this effrot, with the following results…
After this attempt, I decided to pay a lot closer attention to my files in the future, in order to avoid time suckers. Also I learned about when it's more valauble to start over. Which currency is more important, time or material? This is a debate that always pushes me to attempt recycling things, at the expense of my time.
I loved playing with the combinations allowed by the 3 designs, and even explored bracelet making as well as 3 dimensional hinging with a small cube :)
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